Montaigne by Stefan Zweig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thinking the Unthinkable

Emotionally and politically, if not yet militarily, the presidency of Donald Trump has had the same impact on the world as the election of Adolf Hitler in 1933 or the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. It is a shocking, incomprehensible fact which becomes more shocking and incomprehensible every day. Trump establishes a demarcation between one world and another. I don’t feel it an exaggeration to echo Zweig’s feeling for Montaigne’s situation of “precisely a generation like ours, cast by fate into the cataract of the world’s turmoil.”

Before Trump, the United States, while often causing great harm in the world, had some claim to moral standing. It erred, when it did, with some shame and recognition that it wasn’t as honourable as it should be. After Trump it is clear that the great democratic experiment has failed. The United States is merely a banana republic with nuclear weapons. Its factions are mutually criminalising and irreconcilable through either intellect or emotional appeal. Its politics is as brutal and corrupt as that of a recently liberated colony. Its ineptness in governing its own people and communicating with the rest of the world is breath-taking.

This is relevant to Zweig’s Montaigne because it was written in similar circumstances. Exiled from his native Austria, he watched as the civilisation of Europe destroyed itself ideal by ideal. He had already experienced the political and economic disaster of the First World War and the shame that ensued. As he wrote Montaigne, he was overcome by the cultural disaster of European fascism that he perceived would have even more terrible consequences. Shortly after finishing the book, he and his wife despairingly took their own lives.

Montaigne, Zweig felt accurately or not, was a man who encountered a similar mass deterioration of society. A model therefore, possibly even an inspiration as great as Marcus Aurelius, for how to cope with the spiritual and aesthetic chaos of a pervasive and dominant vulgarity. Like Montaigne, Zweig felt “We too need to stand the test, to endure one of the most horrifying collapses of humanity, which follows directly one of its most magnificent periods of advancement.” The book is an exploration of how one might do that.

One also might suspect, given the tragic outcome, that Zweig’s exploration was not all that successful. But then again perhaps it was exactly what was needed to provide the courage to act decisively. In any case it is not necessary to make a judgment using Zweig’s criterion, whatever that was. The reader can use his own aesthetic template to judge both Montaigne and the Zweig one can detect in his version of Montaigne - a man trying with all his resources to comprehend and accept a reality that is in many ways incomprehensible and unacceptable.

“Strong diseases require strong remedies”, wrote Montaigne. Most of us feel the same “fundamental feeling” of impotence which Zweig ascribes to Montaigne and which he claims for himself. Withdrawal until some semblance of rationality rather than cant, of beauty rather than insistent vulgarity returns. “One must seek another certitude beyond the world, beyond the homeland; one must refuse to join the chorus of the demoniacal and create one’s own homeland, one’s own world, outside the present time.” In the age of Trump, what alternative is there? And what if such a return proves impossible? I suppose Zweig’s ultimate choice if one has sufficient courage.

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